More than COP Tourism: Being Useful for Climate Policy
This Friday, I begin traveling east to Dubai, one of an estimated 70,000 people who will be at COP28 for all or some of the 16 days of the meeting. My first trip to a UN climate conference was in 2009, which felt like an experiment. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do anything helpful at Copenhagen’s COP15. I had a close relative pass away at the beginning of the COP and I chose to stay at the meeting rather than return home for the funeral. For my family, I remember COP15 with deep regret.
Perhaps because of that death and the seriousness of the choice to stay, I also invested a lot into the meeting. Even at my first COP, I was very often the only person in a room who had ever worked on or supported an adaptation project or who had some understanding of how climate finance worked in practice. I was almost invariably the only scientist in a room, capable of saying if our knowledge affirmed or denied some point. I felt genuinely useful, at least occasionally. And I learned something important: how ungrounded the discussions and negotiations were from how issues were evolving on the ground. I was not a negotiator, but I found that if I was lucky, listened hard, and couched my arguments carefully, I could be useful to negotiators.
What remains even more shocking is that these early patterns often still hold true: not many people who have experience with planning or managing adaptation projects are at COP. Not many people who understand financial flows for climate are present. It seems very strange to me how few people at COP have ever read an NDC (or who can use the term in a sentence) or have ever met a negotiator. Understanding of the science of climate change, much less adaptation science and evidence, is disturbingly low. In the terms of the evolution of medical knowledge over the past two centuries, we still see professionals using leaches and bloodletting, with a tenuous and vague hold on germ theory, when we need to be using MRIs, chemotherapy, and active large-scale public health programs.
I’ve seen other definitions of “useful” play out at COPs too, often driven by unrealistic expectations of what happens at a big climate conference. These meetings have a magnetic quality if you work on climate issues, and FOMO is a serious risk. Protest culture feels less strong than it did a few years ago, but networking, publication launches, and fundraising bring in a lot of people. Increasingly, I see a lot of “COP tourism,” with large numbers breezing in for a few social media posts from an obscure corner of the convention floor. I am not sure if these people hurt anything by being there (beyond hotel room pricing), but they are not helping negotiations.
Climate policy matters, and climate policy has the potential to reshape almost every aspect of our lives in the coming century. I started going to COPs because I hoped to keep the negotiators from making my work on the ground harder. Now I go because I think they can help make my work easier.
What’s useful at a COP in 2023? Here are a few ideas:
- Measuring resilience accurately and effectively. If COP28 can create a good framework for a global goal on adaptation (GGA), we will have also defined resilience as something we can evaluate and align across funders, programs, and institutions. GGA may be the hardest, most important, and least-reported issue for COP23 to watch out for.
- Keeping Loss and Damage (L&D) and Adaptation Finance as reinforcing, convergent areas of policy. L&D is very contentious and already shows early signs of pulling money and other resources from adaptation. L&D is like a bandaid or a tourniquet for groups severely afflicted by climate impacts, but L&D is not necessarily adaptation. It’s compensation, not preparation. And the donor countries more likely to segment L&D funds from existing adaptation funds rather than add more money — one pie with thinner slices instead of a second pie.
- Investing in the second round of NDCs. Many countries will initiate the process of planning their next set of NDC commitments at this COP. I am hoping we see more ambition and coherence.
You will probably note that I did not mention water in this list. Water is central to all three of these concepts, but _telling_ negotiators that water is important seems less useful than _showing_ them how water helps them meet these goals. Examples include:
- Measuring how water is shared as a central and dynamic resource across sectors like energy, public health, and cities would be on my short list of GGA targets.
- Targeting L&D funds for disaster prevention rather than only disaster response (or combining prevention and response) is a well established way to align compensation with preparation. This is also the difference between seeing water resources as a hazard and seeing them as a medium for resilience. See previous point!
- Countries will be motivated to invest more in NDCs if they see that the better, more strategic national climate planning processes are leading to more and better funding opportunities. Likewise, companies and cities will be more interested in strong NDCs if they see a pipeline of resources that flows to local levels through national climate plans. Mayors should be all over the COP. I don’t see many mayors.
If you are not going to COP, you might be comforted to know that less actual progress happens there than you might think. Most of the real work for this conference happened over the past year, in much smaller and more targeted meetings. The actual events in the blue zone are mostly about revealing the results of that months of work (or lack of work).
I want water — and the water community — to be helpful at COP. We have a small beachhead at the conference, but it’s not always clear if that beachhead is Normandy or Dunkirk. Showing up as someone who lives in this space rather than as a tourist is important.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA